from the city. When he returned Nasir and Abd el Kader had gone off.
There remained Shukri. Lawrence took him out in the Rolls-Royce to show
him off as acting-Governor to the delighted city. The streets were
more crowded than ever. Damascus went mad with joy. The men tossed
up their red felt hats, the women tore off their veils. Householders
threw flowers, hangings, carpets into the road before the car. Their
wives leaned out, screaming with laughter, through the harem-lattices,
splashing Lawrence and Shukri with bath-dippers of scent. Dervishes ran
before and behind, howling and cutting themselves with frenzy, while a
measured chant rose from the men of the crowd: ‘Feisal, Nasir, Shukri,
Aurans,’ rolling in waves round the city. Chauvel, like Barrow, had no
instructions as to what to do with the captured city and was relieved
when Lawrence told him that an Arab government was appointed.
But Lawrence begged him to keep his Australians out of Damascus that
night, because there would be such a carnival as the city had not seen
for six hundred years and Arab hospitality might pervert the troops’
discipline. Chauvel agreed, and asked if it would be convenient to make
a formal entry the next day. Lawrence said: ‘Certainly.’
While they were discussing ceremonial antics there was enormously more
important work waiting inside and outside the city for both of them.
Lawrence felt ashamed to be spoiling Chauvel’s entry in this rather
low-down way, but the political importance of winning the game of grab
justified everything. Now he hurried off to the Town Hall to find Abd
el Kader and his brother, but they had not returned, and when he sent
a messenger to their house he received only a curt reply that they
were sleeping. So should Lawrence have been, but instead he was eating
a snatch meal with the Emir Nuri, Shukri and others, seated on gold
chairs at a gold table in the gaudy banquet-hall. He told the messenger
that the Algerians must come at once or they would be fetched: the
messenger ran off hurriedly.
The old Emir asked quietly what Lawrence meant to do. He answered that
he would dismiss Abd el Kader and his brother. The Emir asked whether
he would call in English troops. Lawrence answered that he might have
to do so, but the trouble was that afterwards they might not go. The
Emir thought a moment and said, ‘You shall have the Ruwalla to do all
you want to do, and at once.’ He ran out to muster his tribe. The
Algerians came to the Town Hall with their body-guards, murder in their
eyes, but on the way met the Ruwalla tribesmen massed under their
Emir; and Nuri Said with his Arab regulars in the Square; and in the
Town Hall itself Lawrence’s reckless body-guard lounging in the
antechamber. They saw that the game was up; but it was a stormy meeting.
Lawrence speaking as Feisal’s deputy pronounced their government
abolished. He named Shukri as acting Military Governor until Ali Riza’s
return. Nuri Said was to be Commandant of Troops, and he appointed also
a Chief of Public Security and an Adjutant-General. Mohammed Said in a
bitter reply denounced Lawrence as a Christian and an Englishman; he
called on Nasir, whom he and his brother had been entertaining and who
knew nothing of Abd el Kader’s treacheries, to assert himself. Nasir
did not understand this falling out of his friends: he could only sit
and look miserable. Abd el Kader leaped up and cursed Lawrence, working
himself up to a fanatic passion. Lawrence paid no attention at all.
This maddened Abd el Kader even more. Suddenly he went for Lawrence
with a drawn dagger.
Like a flash old Auda was on him, still boiling with fury from the
morning’s insult and longing for a fight. Lawrence he loved and trusted
as much as he loathed the traitor Abd el Kader. It would have been
heaven for the old man to have torn the Algerian limb from limb with
his great hands. Again he was pulled away. Abd el Kader was frightened,
and the Emir Nuri closed the debate in his short dry way by saying
that the Ruwalla were at Lawrence’s service, and no questions asked.
The Algerians rose and angrily swept out of the hall. Lawrence was
convinced that they should be seized and shot, but he did not want to
set the Arabs a bad example of political murder on the first day of
their government.
He set about helping Shukri and the rest to organize the government of
the city and province. He knew that the change from war to peace
was an ungracious one; rebels, especially successful rebels, were
necessarily bad subjects and worse governors. Feisal’s unhappy duty
would be to rid himself of most of his war-friends and replace them by
the officials who had been most useful to the Turkish Government. These
were the solid steady people who had been too unimaginative to rebel
and who would work for an Arab government as solidly and steadily as
they had for the Turks. Nasir did not realize this, but Nuri Said and
the Emir Nuri knew it well.
Quickly they collected a staff and began to take the necessary
administrative steps. A police force. The water-supply (for the
city-conduit was foul with dead men and animals). The electric light
supply; most important, for to have the street-lights working again
would be the most obvious sign that peace had come at last—it was
successfully working that night. Sanitation; the streets and squares
were full of the strewn relics of the Turkish retreat, broken carts,
baggage, dead animals, typhus and dysentery corpses. Nuri Said
appointed scavengers to clear up and distributed his few doctors among
the hospitals, promising drugs and stores next day if any were to
be had. A fire-brigade; the local fire-engines had been smashed by
the Germans and the storehouses were still on fire, but volunteers
were sent to blow up houses around the fires to keep the flames from
spreading farther. The prisons; warders and prisoners had vanished
together, so Shukri proclaimed a general amnesty. Civil disturbance;
they must gradually disarm the citizens or at least persuade them not
to carry rifles in the street. Relief-work; the destitute had been
half-starved for days, so the damaged food rescued from the burning
storehouses was distributed among them.
The general food-supply; there were no food-stocks in Damascus
and starvation would follow in two days if steps were not taken
at once. It would be easy to get temporary supplies from the near
villages if confidence were restored, the roads safeguarded and the
transport animals (carried off by the Turks) replaced by others from
the general pool of captures. The British refused to share out, so
the Arab army had to give the city all its own transport animals. The
railway; for the future food-supply. Pointsmen, drivers, firemen,
shopmen, traffic-staff had to be found and re-engaged immediately. The
telegraph-system; the lines had to be repaired and directors appointed.
Finance; the Australians had looted millions of pounds in Turkish
notes, the only currency in use, and reduced it to no value by throwing
it about. One trooper had given a boy a five-hundred pound note for
holding his horse for three minutes. What was left of the British
gold from Akaba was used to stabilize the currency at a low rate of
exchange; but new prices then had to be fixed and this meant setting up
a printing press.
Then a newspaper was demanded, to restore public confidence. Then
Chauvel demanded forage for his forty thousand horses. He had to be
given it, for otherwise he would be compelled to seize what he needed
by main force. The Arabs could expect little mercy from Chauvel and
the fate of Syria’s freedom depended on his being satisfied. Three
Arabic-speaking British officers who had been on the Akaba expedition
with Lawrence helped him and Shukri and the rest with all this hasty
organization. Lawrence’s aim had been to run up a façade rather than
a whole well-fitted building, but so furiously well had the work of
that evening been done that when he left Damascus three days later
the Syrians had a government which endured for two years without
foreign advice, in an occupied country wasted by war, and against the
will of at least one of the occupying Allies.
Lawrence writes then:
‘Later I was sitting alone in my room working and thinking out as firm
a way as the turbulent memories of the day allowed, when the muezzins
began to send their call of last prayer through the moist night over
the illuminations of the feasting city. One, with a ringing voice of
special sweetness, cried into my window from a near mosque. I found
myself involuntarily distinguishing his words: “God alone is great: I
testify that there are no gods but God: and Mohammed is his Prophet.
Come to prayer: come to security. God alone is great: there is no
god—but God.”
‘At the close he dropped his voice two tones, almost to speaking
level, and softly added: “And He is very good to us this day, O people
of Damascus.” The clamour hushed, as every one seemed to obey the call
to prayer on this their first night of perfect freedom.’
It is with this passage that Lawrence closes the popular abridged
version of his great _Seven Pillars of Wisdom_. But almost dishonestly,
for there followed this further sentence:
‘While my fancy, in the overwhelming pause, showed me my loneliness
and lack of reason in their movement: since only for me, of all the
hearers, was the event sorrowful and the phrase meaningless.’
He is referring, I think, both to the extinction of that strong
personal motive that kept him alive through the almost incredible
hardships of his task, and to the shame he felt for deceiving the Arabs
with what still seemed the hollowest of frauds.
XXVIII
He went to sleep, for the first time for days, but was almost
immediately aroused by news that Abd el Kader was making rebellion. He
sent word across to Nuri Said, glad that the mad fellow was digging
his own grave. Abd el Kader had summoned his retainers, told them that
the members of the new government were merely the tools of the English
and called on them to strike a blow for religion while there was yet
time. The simple Algerians had taken his word that it was so and run to
arms. They were joined by the Druses, who were angry that Lawrence had
sharply refused to reward them for their services; they had joined the
Revolt too late to be of any real use. Algerians and Druses together
began to burst open shops and to riot.
Lawrence and Nuri Said waited until dawn, then moved men to the upper
suburbs and swept the rioters towards the river-districts of the
centre of the city. Here machine-guns kept a constant barrage of fire
along the river-front, aimed merely at blank walls but impossible to
pass. Mohammed Said was captured and gaoled; Abd el Kader fled back to
his Yarmuk village. The Druses were expelled from the city, leaving
horses and rifles in the hands of the Damascus citizens enrolled for
the emergency as civic guards. By noon everything was quiet and the
street traffic became normal again with the pedlars hawking, as before,
sweetmeats, iced drinks, flowers and little crimson Arab flags.
When the fighting began Lawrence had called up Chauvel on the telephone
and he had at once offered troops. Lawrence thanked him and asked
for a second company of horse to be added to the company already
stationed at the principal Turkish Barracks; to stand by in case of
need. But they were not needed. The only startling effect was on
the war-correspondents. They were in a hotel, the blank wall of which
was the stop-block of one of the barrages, and began telegraphing home
without sufficient caution the wild stories that were flying about.
Allenby, still in the neighbourhood of Jerusalem, asked Lawrence to
confirm their reports of wholesale massacre. He sent back a death-roll
naming the five victims and the hurts of the ten wounded.
He returned to the organization of public services. The Spanish Consul
called officially; he was representing the interests of seventeen
nationalities and had been vainly searching for some responsible
governing body with which to deal. Lawrence was glad of the opportunity
of using such international channels for spreading the authority of a
Government which he had audaciously appointed on his own initiative.
At midday an Australian doctor appeared, imploring Lawrence for the
sake of humanity to take notice of the Turkish hospital. Lawrence ran
over in his mind the three hospitals in Arab charge, the military, the
civil, the missionary, and told him that they were as well cared for as
they could be. The Arabs could not invent drugs and Chauvel could not
let them have any of his. The doctor went on to describe a huge range
of filthy buildings without a single medical officer or orderly, packed
with dead and dying; mainly dysentery cases, but at least some typhoid;
and it was to be hoped, no typhus or cholera.
Lawrence wondered if he could mean the Turkish barracks where the
two Australian companies were stationed. He asked whether there were
sentries at the gates. ‘Yes, that’s the place,’ said the doctor, ‘but
it’s full of Turkish sick.’ Lawrence walked there at once and parleyed
with the Australian guard. At last his English accent got him
past the little lodge, and a garden filled with two hundred wretched
prisoners in exhaustion and despair. He stood at the great door of the
barrack and called up the dusty echoing corridors.
Nobody answered. The guard had told him that thousands of prisoners had
yesterday gone from here to a camp beyond the city. Since then no one
had come in or out. He walked over to a shuttered lobby and stepped in.
There was a sickening stench and a heap of dead bodies laid out on the
stone floor, some in uniform, some naked. A few were corpses of no more
than a day or two old; some had been there for days. Beyond was a great
ward from which he thought he heard a groan. He walked down the room
between the beds, lifting his white silk skirts off the filthy floor.
It seemed that every bed held a dead man; but as he went forward there
was a stir as several tried to raise their hands. Not one of them had
strength to speak, but the dry whisper ‘Pity, pity’ came in unison.
Lawrence ran into the garden where the Australians had picketed
their horses and asked for a working party. They could not help him.
Kirkbride, the young English officer who had been with Lawrence
since Tafileh and had been foremost in suppressing the Abd el Kader
rebellion, came to help. He had heard that Turkish doctors were
upstairs. He burst open a door and found seven men in nightgowns
sitting on unmade beds in a great room, boiling toffee. Lawrence
impressed on these Turks that the dead must be at once sorted from the
living and a list of the numbers presented to him in half an hour’s
time. Kirkbride, a tall fellow with heavy boots and a ready revolver,
was a suitable overseer of this duty.
Lawrence then found Ali Riza, now back again from the Turks and
appointed Governor, asking him to detail one of the four Arab Army
doctors to take charge of the place. When the doctor arrived the
fifty fittest prisoners of the lodge were pressed to act as a labour
party and set in the backyard to dig a common grave. It was cruelty
to work men so tired and ill, but haste gave Lawrence no choice. The
doctor reported fifty-six dead, two hundred dying, seven hundred not
dangerously ill. A stretcher party was formed, but before the work was
done two of their bodies were added to the heap of dead men in the pit.
The Australians protested that it was no fit place for a grave; the
smell might drive them from their garden.... Lawrence found quicklime
to cover the bodies. Before the work was finished it was midnight, and
Lawrence went off to his hotel, leaving Kirkbride to finish the burying
and close the pit.
Lawrence then slept—for four days he had only allowed himself three
hours’ sleep—and in the morning everything in Damascus seemed to have
cleared up wonderfully. The tramcars were running, the shops open,
grain and vegetables and fruit were coming in well from outside.
The streets were being watered to lay the terrible dust, though no
surface treatment would remedy the damage of three years’ heavy lorry
traffic. Lawrence was particularly glad to see numbers of British
troops sightseeing unarmed in the city. The telegraph was restored with
Palestine and Beyrout. He was sorry to hear that the Arabs had seized
Beyrout the night before, for as long ago as the Wejh operations he had
warned them, when they took Damascus, to leave Beyrout and the Lebanon
to the French, but to take the port of Tripoli, fifty miles north,
instead. Still, he was glad to think that they felt themselves grown-up
enough to disobey him.
Even the hospital was better. The fifty prisoners, now called
‘orderlies,’ had cleaned up the litter and rubbish. Others had gone
through the wards, lifting and washing each patient. One ward had been
cleared of beds, brushed out and sprinkled with disinfectant, and the
less serious cases were about to be transferred here for their ward to
be cleaned in turn. At this rate three days would have seen the place
in fairly good order.
Lawrence was arranging other improvements when an Army Medical Corps
major strode up and asked him shortly whether he spoke English. ‘Yes,’
said Lawrence. The Major looked with disgust at his skirts and sandals
and asked: ‘You’re in charge?’ ‘In a way I am,’ Lawrence answered.
‘Scandalous, disgraceful, outrageous, ought to be shot ...’ the major
bellowed. At this sudden attack Lawrence, whose nerves were very
ragged, began to laugh hysterically; he had been so proud of himself
for having bettered what was apparently past hope. The major had not
seen the charnel-house of the day before, nor smelt it, nor helped in
the burying of the putrefying corpses. He smacked Lawrence in the face
and stalked off.
When Lawrence returned to the hotel he saw large crowds round a
familiar grey Rolls-Royce: he ran in and found Allenby. Allenby
welcomed him and approved the steps that he had taken for setting
up Arab governments at Deraa and Damascus. He confirmed Ali Riza’s
appointment as his military governor and regulated the spheres
of interest for Feisal and Chauvel. He agreed to take over the
barracks-hospital and the railway. In ten minutes all difficulties had
slipped away: Allenby’s confidence and decision and kindliness were
like a pleasant dream.
Then Feisal’s train arrived from Deraa and the rolling cheers as
he came riding up could be heard louder and louder through the windows.
He was coming to call on Allenby, and Lawrence was happy to be the
interpreter between his two masters at their first meeting. Allenby
gave Lawrence, for Feisal, a telegram just received from the British
Government ‘recognizing to the Arabs their status as belligerents.’ But
nobody knew what it meant in English, let alone in Arabic, so Feisal,
smiling but still with tears in his eyes from his welcome by the crowd,
put it aside to satisfy the ambition of a year—he thanked Allenby
for the trust which had helped his Revolt to victory. ‘They were a
strange contrast,’ writes Lawrence—‘Feisal large-eyed, colourless and
worn, like a fine dagger; Allenby gigantic and red and merry, fit
representative of the Power which had thrown a girdle of humour and
strong dealing around the world.’
[Illustration:
description: Photo wide shot man in Arab dress on dark horse
riding in a crowd
caption: FEISAL JUST AFTER HIS MEETING WITH ALLENBY
_Copyright Imperial War Museum_
]
The interview lasted only a few minutes and when Feisal had gone
Lawrence made Allenby the first and last request that he had ever
made for himself—leave to go away. For a while Allenby would not give
it, but Lawrence pointed out how much easier the change from war to
peace conditions would be for the Arabs if his influence were removed.
Allenby understood and gave his permission and then Lawrence at once
realized how sorry he was to be going.
He took leave of his Arab friends. Among those others who came to say
good-bye was Chauvel, who thanked Lawrence warmly for all he had done
for him. He went off then in a Rolls-Royce. For more than a year after
there were groups of his friends hanging about the aerodromes in hope
of his return. It rather annoyed the Air Force officers when they
landed from a flight that each time a small mob came pressing about the
machine, to draw back always disappointed, crying: ‘No Aurans!’
XXIX
He returned to England, arriving in London, after four years’ absence,
on Armistice Day, November 11th, 1918. Feisal arrived a few weeks later
and Lawrence, after first escorting him round England, accompanied him
to Paris for the Peace Conference. Lawrence had been appointed by the
British Foreign Office as a member of the British Delegation, and he
now used the same extraordinary energy that had gone towards winning
the war in the Desert for winning the war in the Council Chamber. But
he knew well that it was a losing one.
The French had made things difficult for a start by refusing to
recognize Feisal as the ruler of Damascus and of the other Syrian
cities that they wanted for themselves. And Feisal’s position was
not at all a secure one. His only right to take part in the Peace
Conference was as representing the ‘ally’ Sherif Hussein, his father,
whose claim to call himself King of the Hejaz (the Holy Province and
the Red Sea coast as far as Akaba) was alone recognized. All official
business had to be transacted in Hussein’s name, though actually no
Hejaz business came before the Peace Conference. All discussion was
limited to Syria and Mesopotamia, about which Hussein’s right to treat
was not admitted by the French. If Hussein and Feisal had been in
agreement it would have been easier, but the ambitious narrow-minded
old man was most jealous of his son. He wanted to rule a great
religious Empire consisting of all the Arabic-speaking parts of the old
Turkish Empire, and to make Mecca his capital.
While the war lasted it was advisable not to oppose him too strongly,
since unity was necessary in the Arab movement; but when the
Armistice came Lawrence set about putting him quietly in his place.
Mecca was the worst city in the whole Arabic-speaking world, a hot-bed
of religious fanaticism (and also of vice) and, because of its sanctity
and its distance from Syria and Mesopotamia, impossible as the capital
of any enlightened State. Also the Desert (for Mecca was the Desert)
could never rule the settled lands: the settled lands were passing into
modern civilization and the Desert would always remain barbarous and
primitive.
Sir Henry McMahon, who as High Commissioner of Egypt had concluded the
first treaty with Hussein that made him enter the war on the side of
the Allies, has told me about Lawrence at Paris. ‘I was appointed,’
he said, ‘as British member of the delegation to Syria, Palestine and
Mesopotamia to report on the feeling of the peoples concerned as to
what governments would be most welcome to them and on the possibility
of gratifying their wishes. When I got to Paris nobody seemed to know
anything about what was happening; I could not even find out who my
colleagues were. The only person who seemed to know every one and
everything and to have access to all the Big Three—Clemenceau, Lloyd
George and Woodrow Wilson—was Lawrence. I don’t know how he did it, but
he was in and out of their private rooms all the time and, as he was
about the only man who knew the whole Eastern geographical and racial
question inside out, they were probably glad of his advice. He found me
my colleagues at once, all except the French delegate: but, possibly,
the French never intended the delegation to go, for the Frenchman
was never appointed and never will be, and nothing ever came of the
business.’